A sensitive and peace-loving 16-year-old boy from an affluent Georgia suburb was fatally gunned down by a police sniper in his own house after he threatened to kill himself following a bad day at school.

Young Andrew Messina cracked after receiving a bad grade and upon returning home he grabbed his parents .357 Magnum and told his mother he wanted to end his life.

Panicked, she called the police to come and talk him down, but instead, an army of deputies, an armoured tank and a sniper arrived at their Towne Lake home....

*****

However, the Messina's attorney Chuck Pekor believes that the police had no justification to shoot the suicidal teen.

'There is nobody in there with him. There is nobody at risk except himself. You just give it time, just wait,' Pekor said about the standoff which had lasted a little more than an hour.

'Not a single officer out there, not a one, ever saw the gun come through the hole where the break was.'

Furthermore, Pekor finds irregularities with the account that he was directly threatening the negotiating team.

This is because he was shot sideways through his abdomen, with the bullet entering his right side and exiting the left.

This meant that the right handed boy would have been facing the opposite direction to the police team when he was shot.

Furthermore, Yarbrough had only been on the scene for less than 20 minutes and has admitted he didn't even know if there was a hostage with the boy.

An internal investigation by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office and the district attorney both found there was no criminal wrongdoing by Yarbrough.

However, the Messina's are in the process of filing a lawsuit againt the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.

Andrew Messina’s mom called Cherokee 911 when her son threaten to kill them both in their Eagle Watch home in Towne Lake.

Lisa describes her son’s medications, past counseling, how he obtained the gun she believed to be locked in their home, what she said triggered his actions and how he threatened to kill them both to the 911 operator.

Towne Lake is not an affluent Georgia suburb It’s in Cherokee County. For Woodstock, GA In 2000, the median income for a household in the city was $58,506, and the median income for a family was $65,740.

32
posted on 10/27/2012 8:33:25 PM PDT
by higgmeister
( In the Shadow of The Big Chicken!)

Cherokee County Sheriff Roger Garrison said that the 16-year-old boy had made an aggressive gesture by smashing through a glass window pane in the front door near to the negotiating teams.

'We would still be sitting there today if it weren't for that very, very aggressive act that he made of ramming the gun and a pistol straight through a glass door at our officers,' said Cherokee County Sheriff Roger Garrison, the day after the shooting.

Suicide by cop.

36
posted on 10/27/2012 8:56:18 PM PDT
by Moonman62
(The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)

Did the family have a dog for the police to shoot? If they are called to an address they are given the opportunity to shoot someone there but a dog is the primary target. Every house should ave a dog to give the police something suitable to shoot in order to spare your family more serious trauma. It is hard to part with a family pet but parting with a child or a husband is worse.

When I was a kid men knew to never run from the police. If you ran you were subject to being shot as a fleeing felon. We did not complain about this or have demonstrations. It was a fact of life and people did not run when police told them to stop unless one had committed a crime punishment for which was deemed to be worse than the chance of the cop being a good shot. Children learned from their parents to respect police and to stop when spoken to by police and co-operate. Now that is mus\ch less the case.You learn to clam up and request an attorney if a cop says anything more than "Hi." You avoid police even if you witnessed a crime or an auto accident. Policemen hshould be regarded as IEDs with unreliable triggers.

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